Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Probably a must-read for every tech startup. Boring but useful. Kinda like a textbook I guess.

The most interesting thing I learnt from it was to develop a MVP, a minimum viable product, before launching anything big. You have to ascertain the fact that people are willing to pay for something small before developing a more complex product. This is very important. People tend to want only to release a perfect version but you may end up having a white elephant on your hands. Counterintuitive as it may seem, it makes more sense to put out an imperfect product to gauge consumer demand instead.

I also learnt the importance of doing A/B testing. This refers to experiments where you change only one variable to determine what customers prefer. Very simple and very effective, yet seldom practiced. The author repeatedly emphasises the importance of doing A/B testing and I am a convert. I guess this is most applicable to tech startups where they have access to competent programmers. Probably harder for mom and pop stores or retail outlets that depend more on human traffic rather than online traffic. Though I must say that the concepts can be tweaked and applied to a certain extent.

There were several other things the author mentioned which were either not memorable or were concepts too difficult for me to grasp.

This is a very dry book to go through so you'll probably do best to pace yourself. A valuable tool for the tech entrepreneur out there although certain concepts can also be applied to those in other fields.